As the woman who kickstarted the modern fitness industry, Lotte Berk, has her
life story told by her daughter, Esther Fairfax.

If you’ve ever suspected that exercise fanatics are more than slightly crazed, then Lotte Berk provides the proof. The woman who kickstarted the modern fitness industry emerges from her life story – told by her daughter, Esther Fairfax – as one of the strangest and most ruthless characters of the 20th century.

Celebrities from the Sixties onwards – including Zoë Wanamaker, Maureen Lipman, Prue Leith, Shirley Conran, Joan Collins and Britt Ekland – flocked to Berk’s classes to improve their attractiveness in mini skirts. Lotte told them, in a thick German accent, how to adopt suggestive poses. “Think of your lover as a string bean,” Leith recalls being instructed as she squeezed her pelvis. In between bursts of helpless laughter, those strong enough to keep up became almost (though never quite) as svelte as Berk herself.

But behind that entertaining public face lay a deeply neurotic woman with a vicious tongue which she directed at anyone who crossed her, including her daughter, who dared to go into the exercise business, too. “Are you mad?” she would frequently ask, and not in an affectionate way. Addicted to chocolate, morphine, sleeping pills and, above all, sex, she was a Mommie Dearest who made Joan Crawford look like Mary Poppins.

“I think of her alongside women like Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo - tough, striking German survivors. She was hard to live with, but she had such beauty, charisma, talent and intelligence that I worshipped her,” says Esther, ushering me into the Hungerford studio where she still teaches exercise, exactly as her mother used to do.

At 76, and looking as if she has stepped out of a pre-war German expressionist painting, Esther is still able to out stomach-crunch the women half her age who come to her classes. “How else would I look like this,” she says, patting the rock-hard abdomen that lurks somewhere inside the silk shirt flapping around her thin frame. The only woman who has ever been able to beat her at the exercise game was Lotte herself, whose life was devoted to feverish competition with all other women to catch men’s eyes - and also, Esther now realises, cover up for some of the deeper hurts of her early life as a Jew growing up in pre-war Germany. “She always had to be the best,” says her daughter who, seven years after her mother’s death aged 90, is only just beginning to emerge from Lotte’s long shadow.

Shadow is a benign word for the darkness cast by the upbringing Esther endured at the hands of a mother who appeared to have no concern for her feelings. When she was eight, and her mother wanted to be left in peace to conduct an extramarital affair, she parcelled her daughter off to lodge with people who wanted a companion for their feral daughter. “The girl would beat me up, and I begged mother to take me away, but she ingored my needs. I’ll never understand how you could do that to a child for the love of a man.”

Even more bewildering was her mother’s apparent indifference when Esther told her that her father (who liked the family to wander around naked) had got into bed with her, aged 12, and played a game of “knock, knock” at the door of her virginity. “Many years later she told me that she was furious. 'If you ever do that again, I will leave you,’ she told him. But she never said anything to me about it, so I never felt listened to or cared for.”

The catalogue of her unorthodox behaviour is long, and baroque. There was the time she offered her daughter, aged 15, a shilling for performing oral sex on a man with whom she was appearing at a local theatre. When, that same year Esther was raped by the producer of a show in which her parents were appearing, she instructed her daughter to “...forget about it. We could all lose our jobs.”

Some years ago, Esther’s two sons, who had heard only their mother’s least alarming stories, suggested that she write about her extraordinary mother. The idea appealed. “I thought I would write for my grandsons, who were then very young, but it was far too salacious. After a few pages, I thought, I can’t let them read this, but I carried on writing anyway.”

During the first draft, there were many tears. On her second attempt, she coped better, injected more humour - and began to both understand and forgive the woman who was born Lieselotte Heymansohn in Cologne, in 1913. The daughter of a successful Jewish tailor, she was a prodigy at the piano. Chauffeur-driven everywhere during her early life, she later became even more passionate about modern dance. It was this choice of career which, along with her dancer husband Ernest’s British passport, enabled her to leave Germany for safety in Britain. In 1933, at a final performance during which she was banned from dancing because of her race, she stepped on stage in front of an audience of SS officers and announced, with typical chutzpah: “Thank you for not being Nazis.”

In Britain, she made a career for herself with Ballet Rambert and Ensa, among others. When she grew too old to dance, depression descended, but out of her despair came the fitness classes which, when she began in 1959, were the first of their kind. “Until then it was all sports and keep fit,” Esther explains, “but her exercises were based on dance - and the pelvic tilt which protects the spine.”

With names like The Prostitute and The French Lavatory, they sound like racy forerunners of Pilates, which also works on core strength rather than aerobic fitness. “Absolutely not,” says Esther, who admits to not knowing much about rival regimes, because she remains utterly loyal to her mother’s way, about which she has written three previous books. Apart from Alexander Technique and yoga, she dismisses all other modern exercises regimes as “fads”. “Shall I teach you some?” she offers.

But it’s not exercises that interest me so much as Lotte herself. Why was she so keen to seduce every man who passed through her life - and some women? Esther believes her mother’s sex obsession dates back to the aftermath of her own mother’s death from a stroke when she was eight. “Her father was crying and she tried to calm him down by saying that she would marry him herself. 'Yes darling, that would be lovely,’ he said. Then when he married her step-mother, she couldn’t understand it. After that I think she used other men to punish her father. And of course she must have felt terribly guilty because she never made peace with him before he and her step-mother were sent to the gas chamber in Auschwitz.”

All her life, Lotte Berk dressed only in black, to match her severe bob. Esther has the same bob (the haircut she was given as a child), but her hair is white, which makes her appear a paler, softer version of her mother. “I know. I can’t get away from her. She haunts me every time I look in the mirror. Maybe I have chosen to look like her because she was such an idol to me. I wanted to be like her, but not so hurtful.”

It has taken a long time, and has been a painful process, but she seems to have succeeded. In her twenties, her need to escape the allure/rejection of her mother led her into bulimia, sleeping pill addiction, and marriage to an alcoholic poet. John Fairfax, who died 18 months ago, was as controlling as her mother - he wouldn’t even let her drive - but in other ways kind to her, and their two sons.

On January 25th 1981, her life started to come right. “It was the day I left him, which I celebrate every year.” Running her own classes, and working as a counsellor, gradually she began to build the self-confidence that she lacked. The book has been another step along that path. “I can’t believe anyone is interested in what I have to say,” she says. “When I found a publisher and he was a man, I was amazed. I thought this would be a book for women.”

“Men have mothers too,” he told her. Few of them, fortunately, are as colourful, or destructive, as Lotte Berk.